Science Fiction Studies

# 6 = Volume 2, Part 2 = July 1975

William W. Matter

The Utopian Tradition and Aldous Huxley

The study of various touchstones in the history of man's search for the ideal
commonwealth affords valuable insight into ideas and ideals that profoundly
influenced the utopian thought of Aldous Huxley. Brave New World, Ape
and Essence, and Island evidence their author's awareness of, and in
many cases his dislike for, major phases in utopian literature. Early writings
contain references to mythical islands and to a prehistoric Golden Age that
provided a simple but an incredibly congenial life. Such a myth must surely
suggest wish-fulfillment and escapist tendencies. Especially in Brave New
World, Huxley rejects primitivistic and pastoral perfection. Opposed to the
escapist utopia of private pleasures is the ideal commonwealth established and
maintained by careful regulation. This sort of utopia, of which Plato's Republic
is the best known example, requires that the individual must offer much of his
freedom for the privilege of living in the heavenly city and pursuing the good.
Though the Republic is much more descriptive than prescriptive, Huxley
strenuously objects to the work's seemingly authoritarian stance. He cannot
accept the Republic as descriptive of the good, and he clearly cannot
regard the work as a prescription for attaining desirable goals. According to
Huxley's philosophy, it is an example of the type of utopia that must be
avoided.

Almost all of the early Greek utopists were highly restrictive. Renaissance
writers attempted to expand man's freedom in the ideal commonwealth; but, for
the most part, they did so unconvincingly. Criminals are usually punished
severely in these utopias because civil disobedience pulls at the closely-knit
fabric of the ideal society. For the same reason, all regulations must be
steadfastly enforced. War, too, is an integral part of life in the early
utopias. Like contemporary residents in less "perfect" countries,
utopians often find it necessary to prepare themselves for the danger of attack.
Plato's citizens are warriors; More's island is strongly fortified; and
Campanella's city is encircled by high walls. Huxley's Pala, in contrast, does
not have the typical defenses; thus it is easily invaded by armored vehicles and
foreign troops.

Helpful to peace-time utopian unity and success are the public stores and the
common tables that are a part of most early ideal cities, and the community of
wives, property, and children described in many such works. Eugenic controls
frequently aid in stabilizing the populace. Education, too, is a central concern
to Plato, More, Andreae, Huxley, and other utopists. It helps prepare the people
for life in the new world.

The gradual development of science intrigued utopian writers and provided
them with a tool to make the earthly paradise appear more realizable in fact. As
man improved his science, many utopists saw emerging a deus ex machina.
The steel and iron god of industrialization promised plenty for all. Instead of
studiously avoiding luxury as an instrument destructive to unity and stability,
theorists of the nineteenth century eagerly welcomed industry and science as
benevolent agents supremely equipped to provide abundantly for each member of
the ideal society. Still, subjugation of the individual to a central authority
that had both the power and the wisdom to administer effectively in a perfect
world remained as a central theme in utopian literature.

Certainly, the major elements of utopianism described here did not go
unchallenged. Aristophanes and Aristotle viewed the Platonic ideal as exceeding
the limits of credibility. Aristotle resorted to a more practical plan of
utopianism in his Politics, and Aristophanes produced an anti-utopia in
which sexual practices are submitted to quite massive indecencies; men and
women, as Bernard laments in Brave New World, begin to think of
themselves and others as meat. With Aristophanes, the most spoiled meat wins the
day. In A.F. 632, meat does not spoil; it simply vanishes in the smoke emitted
from the body-burning incinerators.

The concept of the noble savage whose social sphere is untainted by
cultivated evils represents another deviation from the mainstream of the utopian
tradition. The life of Montaigne's cannibals, though, proved distasteful to most
authors who constructed ideal commonwealths. The nineteenth century, too, had
its rebel utopists. Morris returned to the land, and Butler banned machines from
his utopia. The major accent in the nineteenth century, however, was upon
industrialization and upon the idea that progress could actually produce the
utopia that writers like Bellamy saw waiting for a happy combination of man and
machine to realize.

In the early twentieth century, Wells reinforced Bellamy's optimism and
speculated upon a world-wide utopia forged from science's successful
confrontation with the enemies of progress. One such enemy was Aldous Huxley. He
strongly opposed the belief that progress, especially progress through science,
would bring about a perfect world. The general view that industry could not
fulfill all of man's needs led some utopists to espouse an increasingly popular
and pessimistic negation of the machine. Reflective of the mood of the times,
dystopian fiction assumed the leading role in the utopian genre. Writers began
to question both classical utopianism and the even more positively optimistic
utopias of the late nineteenth century. The conflict is excellently described by
Negley and Patrick: "Of course, the utopist proclaims the freedom and
happiness of the individual in his ideal society, but the reader must ponder the
questionable status of the individual in the completely centralized and
institutionalized economic or political or religious society. It was fear of the
institutionalization of men that alarmed such satirists as Huxley and
Orwell."1 The fear of totalitarian utopias was extremely
important to the utopian tradition in the first half of the twentieth century.
The doubts voiced by Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell are captured in the following
brief passage by Lewis Mumford:

Isolation, stratification, fixation, regimentation, standardization,
militarization—one or more of these attributes enter into the conception
of the utopian city, as expounded by the Greeks. And these same features
remain, in open or disguised form, even in the supposedly more democratic
utopias of the nineteenth century, such as Bellamy's Looking Backward. In
the end, utopia merges into the dystopia of the twentieth century; and one
suddenly realizes that the distance between the positive ideal and the
negative one was never so great as the advocates or admirers of utopia had
professed.2

Satire has always been a part of utopian thought. As numerous critics have
observed, the very idea of creating a better world implies that there is
something wrong with the present world. Many of the most enduring works in the
utopian genre contain sharp criticisms of contemporary society. Instead of
taking the reader to utopia and stressing the abuses of the outside world,
however, writers of utopian literature began to emphasize the inhumanity of a
"perfect" world and to suggest that contemporary society was pleasant
by comparison. The twentieth-century dystopian view was not completely new;
Aristophanes's anti-utopia is at least as old as the Republic. Swift and
even More himself at times treated the concept of utopia satirically. For the
first time in the history of utopian thought, however, the dystopian viewpoint
displaced traditional utopianism as the most significant element in the
philosophy of utopian speculations. Until the twentieth century, few authors had
labored extensively over satires of utopia. Heretofore, utopia had been in large
measure a good place to visit.

But it became increasingly and frighteningly apparent to writers like Huxley
that, as Nicolas Berdiaeff remarks, utopia is realizable. Prefaced to Brave
New World is a comment in French by Berdiaeff which insists that in the new
century reasonable men may well search for a way to avoid "utopia" and
return, instead, to a society that is less "perfect" but more free. Brave
New World serves as a powerful warning that man may reach the so-often
sought for state of the ideal commonwealth. Huxley's world-wide utopia, though,
is considerably less desirable than Wells imagined that it might be. The novel
is an attack upon utopianism—an attack that one cannot fully understand unless
he has some knowledge of the utopian tradition and the works against which
Huxley particularly campaigned. In effect, Huxley says that Plato's republic of
rigid stability and unity—a society with little personal freedom and no
innovation—is stagnant and unproductive. His literary assault upon the utopian
tradition is sweeping and not entirely unjustified. Individuality does indeed
frequently disappear behind a facade of utopian order and reason.

Huxley's other major target in Brave New World is the nineteenth-century
utopia which assumes that scientific progress leads to an ideal world. Huxley,
it becomes apparent, is fond of neither mechanization nor the concept of
progress. He implies that wholesale industrialization creates men like machines
and that too much stress upon progress unjustly sacrifices the here and now for
the potentially better tomorrow. In Brave New World he rebels against the
idea of progress and mechanization, and he disallows the very concept of utopia.
Neither the primitive existence of the Indians, the ungoverned agricultural
community of Alphas, nor the world-wide utopia can be defined as ideal. The
society of A.F. 632 is "perfectly" terrifying to the creative
individual who wishes to test the gates of heaven and hell, and who seeks to
find doors of perceptions not conveniently opened for perverse purposes by the
state. When pleasure and escape become unavoidable goals, Huxley reasons, the
individual lives in a nightmarish ideal society that cannot allow him the right
to be unhappy.

In his second dystopia, Huxley rescues society from utopia, but the cost is
high. In Ape and Essence one sees an alternative that science and
industry may provide. The inhabitants of twenty-second century America are even
more perverse and pathetically ill-directed than Our Ford could have imagined.
Still, there is some promise of a less abnormal life in the "Hot
Community"—a community that does not treat sex and love animalistically
as the early utopists often did.

It may seem curious that an author who so soundly denounces both traditional
and most later utopian efforts could also create one, but Huxley's final utopian
insight is predictable from his development toward a philosophy of escape.
Huxley was bound ultimately to find his utopia, for he dwelled at length in the
very nebulous land of negations. One gets only a hint in his dystopias of what
their satisfactory commutation might be.

In many ways Huxley's last novel is traditionally utopian. The ideal
commonwealth is an island populated by beautiful people and discovered by a
traveler who, after being shipwrecked on paradise, uncovers the attributes of
the ideal society— occasionally with skepticism but usually with joy. As
Northrop Frye notes: "in utopian stories a frequent device is for someone,
generally a first-person narrator, to enter the utopia and be shown around it by
a sort of tourist guide."3 In Brave New World it is the
Savage who tours utopia. In Ape and Essence it is Dr. Alfred Poole who
learns of modern conditions, and in Island Will Farnaby becomes a
disciple of the Palanese system of values. As in Utopia and many other
similar works, the skepticism of the central character is refuted by the
unshakeable logic of a people accustomed to the ideal. Much unlike most utopias,
however, the island society of Pala insists upon the rights of the individual
for self-discovery, self-awareness, and self-satisfaction. The dominant
atmosphere of Huxley's utopia suggests an insistence upon freedom, love,
personal pleasures, and a mind-body interaction typical of News from Nowhere
but completely atypical of most ideal commonwealths. The key to happiness on
Pala is the here and now—not a vague promise of future happiness engendered by
a trust in progress.

The examination of Huxley's three utopian novels against a background of the
utopian tradition allows one to see more clearly those themes that influenced
Huxley most. He shows the reader that the ends many utopists have sought, and
not the means they employ to achieve these ends, are at fault. After reading Brave
New World, one might assume that Huxley feels that conditioning infants is
always wrong. Upon perusing Island, however, one becomes aware that it is
only the end toward which conditioning is directed in Brave New World
that Huxley resents. In Island, conditioning for love and not for fear is
endorsed. Similarly, after reading Huxley's depiction of the liberal sex
practices of the brave new world and the "heat" period of 2108, one
might conclude that the author is puritanical with respect to sex. But in Island
each child is instructed in the yoga of love and is permitted at an early age to
have sexual experiences. Again, it is the end toward which sex is directed in Brave
New World and Ape and Essence that Huxley deplores. Meaningful sexual
relationships, especially those involving a yoga of love, are applauded; only
shallow, unthinking adventures in sex are condemned. The worst of the East and
the West is discussed in Ape and Essence, but Huxley is strongly in favor
of a meeting of the best aspects of the East and the West. In Brave New World
artificial insemination and sperm banks lead to production-line people; in Island
the same devices of science, employed for humane goals, improve the race. Ape
and Essence and Brave New World are attacks upon man's use of
technology. In Island science serves man; it does not control him.
Similarly, soma is evil because it is used for escape; but moksha-medicine
reveals reality.

The societies of Brave New World and Ape and Essence were
directed toward goals which Huxley regards as unprofitable and frequently
destructive to the human spirit. Island, on the other hand, describes a
society with a sound sense of direction. The key to the change in Huxley's
philosophy is found in the 1946 foreword to Brave New World. At one time,
the author says, he considered man's choice to be between lunacy and insanity.
But in his foreword an escape is briefly described. In such a community, Huxley
states, "science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath,
they had been made for man, not...as though man were to be adapted and enslaved
to them. Religion would be the conscious and intelligent pursuit of man's Final
End, the unitive knowledge of the immanent Tao or Logos, the transcendent
Godhead or Brahman." Huxley declares that the general notion of a utopian
escape was "in the back of my mind at that time [1946], and it has
preoccupied me a good deal ever since."4 But in Island
the final realization of the author's preoccupation occurs. It is evident, then,
that Huxley's last novel is the result of a gradual progression of his utopian
philosophy. Thus all three works are indicative of their creator's awareness of
and his reaction to the utopian tradition.

It would be erroneous, however, to insist that Huxley was a careful student
of all aspects of utopian literature. He obviously knew the Republic well
enough to dislike it. He mentions Erewhon in Island, and he wrote
an introduction to a privately printed edition of Butler's novel.5
That he was conversant with many of the utopian conventions is attested to both
by his fiction and by numerous incidental comments. About Island Huxley
states: "And then, as in News from Nowhere and other utopias, I have
another intruder from the outside world, whose guided tour provides a means of
describing the society."6 His article entitled "Boundaries
of Utopia" criticizes utopias like those of Bellamy and Wells that predict
a perfect world achieved through progress.7 Yet from such
indications, which suggest that Huxley knew the history of utopian thought
intimately, one cannot logically conclude that he read widely in all of the
varied aspects of utopianism. Rather, Huxley was influenced by general
impressions of what he did not like in utopia and by occasional utopian works
which he found palatable. It is for this reason that a selective survey of
utopianism joined with an analysis of Huxley's own versions of the ideal
commonwealth is a particularly effective tool of scholarship.

After conducting such a study, one is tempted to offer some conclusions with
respect to both utopianism and Huxley. Regarding the former, White observes that
"the impulse to create utopias...lies close to the fundamental motives of
all human activity."8 Moreover, the utopias man creates, as
Mumford comments, may be designed primarily for escape or for social
reconstruction.9 Finally, they may be intended, like the Ecclesiazusae
and Brave New World, as a condemnation of utopian goals. Until mankind
reaches a stage where he sees no further need for improvement, however, writers
will continue to speculate about utopia. Sometimes they feel as did More that
utopia may be impossible to achieve; but man's hopes are more easily equated
with Bellamy's plans for actual Nationalism, with Plato's efforts at Syracuse,
with the disillusioned Hawthorne at Brook Farm, with John Lennon who imagines a
world without possessions and a brotherhood of man,10 and with the
idealistic hippie in his New Mexico commune. Regardless of man's desire to find
utopia, though, the history of actual attempts at utopian living, as Frye
remarks, makes "melancholy reading."11 It also makes for a
considerable amount of reading. Many volumes describe various of man's utopian
projects.12 In the last decade, for example, the hippie movement has
taken on the atmosphere of a search for the ideal existence. The numerous
communes that have only a tentative existence are suggestive of earlier utopian
communities and of the isolated societies which Huxley supports. The commune
philosophy, based as it often is upon a denial of materialism and an emphasis on
Eastern ideals, shares those aims with the people of Pala.

In order to establish a long-lasting utopia, however, one must find a way to
do away altogether with man's follies and his frailties. Plato employed eugenics
and primitive conditioning practices to achieve that goal in his Republic.
Modern theorists like B.F. Skinner rely upon a more sophisticated conditioning
procedure. The belief that humanity can be conditioned to behave properly in a
perfect world is viable if one assumes that man is a tabula rasa; but if the
human mind has innate instincts for experiences less desirable and less perfect
than those found in utopia, man will never reach that ideal island. If mankind
has, as Conrad suggests, a "heart of darkness," then the desire to
witness heroic struggles and to see pain as well as pleasure cannot be removed
by conditioning. Huxley is one of the very few utopists to allow heroic
struggles and sorrow to enter into the earthly paradise, and his utopia cannot
endure the insanity of the world outside. Perhaps utopia is, after all, too good
to exist in fact. Perhaps the only way to achieve perfection is to make man less
than human as Huxley does in Brave New World. The most notable utopias
frequently must sacrifice creativity and true art for more practical qualities.
Even the old Raga on Pala admits that good literature and the good life are
antagonistic (p. 204). The reader remembers that the islanders enjoy the good
literature vicariously by reading in a language not their own. Oedipus in
Pala, as a sample of a native effort, leaves one relieved that the Palanese
are not a writing people. Utopists, of necessity, must make oblations to achieve
feasibility. Sometimes only the family pet suffers; but at other times the poet
is banished, and man must give up his freedom, his individuality, and his
creativity for the honor of living in utopia.

In Brave New World, Huxley attacks the utopian tradition; he modifies
his assault in Ape and Essence to include the possibility of escape. In
his last novel he describes that escape. From the fact of the unhappy
destruction of Palanese values by the Essential Horror in the world, one must
conclude that Huxley's opinion of the direction that society insists upon taking
has not changed appreciably since he produced his first dystopian work.

NOTES

1Glenn R. Negley and J. Max Patrick, The Quest for Utopia: An
Anthology of Imaginary Societies (New York 1952), p8.

2Lewis Mumford, "Utopia, The City and the Machine," in Utopias
and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E. Manuel (Boston 1965), p9.

Brave New World, Ape and Essence, and Island
evidence their authors awareness of, and in many cases his dislike for, major phases
in utropian literature. Early utopias contain references to mythical islands and a
prehistoric Golden Age: especially in BNW, Huxley rejects such primitivist and pastoral
perfection. Opposed to the escapist utopia of private pleasures is the idea commonwealth
established and maintained by careful regulation. This sort of utopia, of which
Platos Republic is the best known example, requires that the individual offer
much of his freedom for the privilege of living in the heavenly city and pursuing the
good. In BNW, Huxley attacks both the pastoral and authoritarian elements in utopian
tradition; he modifies his assault in Ape and Essence to include the possibility of
escape. And in his last novel, Island, he describes that escape. From the fact of
the unhappy destruction of Palanese values by the Essential Horror in the world, however,
one must conclude that Huxleys opinion of the direction that society insists upon
taking did not change appreciably over the course of his career.